On another, now warmingly familiar day of glory for British cycling designed
to reheat the joys of London 2012 and all that, Sir Bradley Wiggins ended up
resplendent in the gold jersey as the champion of his home Tour of Britain
while his old team-mate Mark Cavendish roared once more to another
inevitably majestic stage triumph.

Back on top: Sir Bradley Wiggins celebrates on the podium after winning the 2013 Tour of BritainPhoto: REUTERS

Tens of thousands lined the streets of central London at the climax of the most successful edition in the annals of the national Tour to cheer home the dynamic duo who have done so much to inspire the domestic cycling revolution. They were rewarded with quite the perfect result.

After a wretched 2013 campaign in which Wiggins had bailed out of the Giro d’Italia with illness and failed even to land the chance of defending his Tour de France title through injury, it clearly meant a huge amount to Wiggins to prove he is back in business by winning for the first time the race he once competed in as a 19-year-old.

Nobody was pretending that, at 33, winning the Tour of Britain was in any way comparable to his triumph in Paris last year but, nonetheless, in the euphoria spilling around Whitehall there were still eerie echoes of that amazing day on the Champs Elysées when ‘Cav’ blitzed to victory on the final stage and Wiggins came home in yellow.

This time, after 10 circuits of 8.8km up and down the banks of the Thames, Cavendish, guided into the perfect position by veteran team-mate Alessandro Petacchi, a man who like Cavendish knows how it feels to be the world’s fastest, struck for the line irresistibly after they whipped round the final tight corner out of Parliament Square and zoomed up Whitehall past Downing Street towards the line.

Nobody could touch the master as he comfortably outpaced Irishman Sam Bennett to land his third win of the eight-stage Tour and his second of the weekend after triumph in Guildford on Saturday, taking his all-time record of stage wins to 10.

Behind him Wiggins, who came home safely 23rd in the pack, reckoned his major emotion was relief because he had come through the pressure of delivering the ‘gold’ for his Sky team-mates who had worked slavishly on the hills of Wales and the West Country to defend his lead from the moment he took control of the race with Tuesday’s masterful time trial at Knowlsey. This, he insisted, had been no “ceremonial ride” around the London streets.

For even though his 26-second lead over Swiss Martin Elmiger had looked unassailable going into this final stage, he had been petrified even with five kilometres left that he might be brought down in a crash.

“Cav’s the fastest man in the world and there’s one or two who can get near him but there are some muppets in there as well and I thought they were going to go down with 5km to go,” said Wiggins, witheringly. “Guys in 25th, 30th place, jostling like they’re going for the win, and if they’d fallen and the race taken a split, I could have lost it.” No chance. “This week was the first time I’ve felt like I’ve come out with the commitment and the desire I showed last year [at the Tour and Olympics].”

For Mick Bennett, the long-time race organiser, to see a British sporting hero becoming the biggest-name winner of the Tour he has organised on no less than 20 occasions down the years meant it was a dream result.

“Wiggins winning is absolutely brilliant for the race,” said Bennett, the former Olympic team pursuit medallist. “I think it is a first. I don’t think a ‘Sir’ has ever won a stage race before and that says it all. To have a knight of the realm coming up the finishing straight in the gold jersey is a bit of a coup, isn’t it? That and Cav’s win!”

This, reckoned Bennett, felt like the sort of week when his event deserved to become part of the mainstream of British sport, not a mere afterthought on the calendar.

Effectively, it was a coming-of-age party for the event. Some of the racing was brilliant, the settings (despite the weather) quite breathtaking and the record numbers of fans, believed to be well over one and a half million compared to last year’s 1.25million, having lined the streets from Peebles in Scotland all the way to London, gave the event a fevered feel way beyond its status as a third-tier UCI race.

Wiggins reckoned we had even seen the next big star of the sport in Bury’s Dartmoor stage winner Simon Yates, who finished third overall at just 21.

Bennett, who says his ambition is to see the Tour promoted to an hors catégorie event – the races considered by the UCI to be on the rung below the major WorldTour events - reckons his only problem is that he may have helped create a monster. “The race commissaires have just told me ‘the next problem you have is that it’s become almost too popular and that there are almost too many people on the side of the road!’ They said you need to think in the future how you manage the crowds,” he said.

Wiggins simply adored the reception. “It’s been overwhelming at times and nice to see,” he said. “It’s been a big year for cycling. At the start of the year, all the talk worldwide was all Lance Armstrong and stuff and, since then, no-one’s mentioned Lance for the rest of the year. So it’s nice to come out to race like this when it’s just about the sport and people come out because they love it. I enjoy it when it’s like that.”